Currently I’m rushing to get my shit together for the Rifflandia deadline. If we even get the nod it looks like we’ll be opening at the Cambie Esquimalt but at least I can say I made the half assed attempt. Working full time (ah excuses) is draining and leaves little room for life. I’m trying not to let life get the best of me and follow my heart. Walker’s moving to Vancouver come October so I need my ducks in a row when that comes around. We still plan on doing shows but I know it’ll be slow going. Hopefully Van will open a few new avenues up for us.

Work on the album has been slow but I’ve been making some comfortable progress with it.I’ve refrained from posting any new music on the cloud as I find it detracts from my overall output – the small bit of satisfaction for something <em<done tides me over until the apathy grows to great again and I push another one through the tube. I’ve been listening to Heaven on repeat though and god damn, Elgin-Skye sounds fucking AMAZING on the track. Seriously want to share it right now but it will come.

For the last 16 months I’ve slowly been working on a short film. Hope you enjoy. Not an album but we’re getting there. Watch both halves for details on the album name and artwork.

Special thanks to Brad Wutke (Buyproduct), Kristy Farkas and Margaret Mews for helping to provide the soundtrack.

At the end of the week I will be at the end of my formal education. For now at least, there’s always that Ph.D. to spend a third of my life on but for now I’ll end it with a humble Bachelor of Arts. Regardless, life is become threateningly real for me right about now. I’m torn between growing up and going with it – though I realize in the end a lot of these choices are made for me.

Album is coming along well. As promised, something big at (woo) at the end of the week. It might not be what you were expecting but it might shed a bit of light on the rest of it. All I can say is that it’s time to let the camera roll. A false sense of liturgical Americana might prefix the aforementioned project but it’s pretty key to the first true paragraph in this entry. Pretty sure you can tell I’m scramblin’ here.

New music? Pretty fucking sure of it. Tomorrow I’ll be posting the sound of the …week…give me a break we all have lives. Only a quarter of mine recently has been devoted to tumblr escapism. Sounds oh so much better than voyeurism but really it’s a narrative work of fiction as much as we want it to be – the juxtaposition of images is provides more than enough room for us to justify locational narrative. Anyways, how do you spend all your time on the internet? Never felt so good to relieve myself of the mountain of guilt becoming a shut-in seams to cause. Looks like I want to perceive Cudi and I have more in common than I would originally of told myself to assume.

There are only a few weeks left until the deadline for the rough cut of my album to be done. After that it’s polish polish polish until it’s done son. Some of you know this but I’ve been working on the album for university credit as well – gotta get it done somehow. My institution, Vancouver Island University was recently on strike and we lost over a month of the semester.

Originally the semester was going to be scrapped and I would have had to come back in September but luckily the strike was over at the eleventh hour. Solidarity with the union and all that rot but what a rough way for it to end. This is my final semester and it feels like a weak way to graduate. On and off through the semesters it has felt like I’ve been paying for a credential instead of earning it and nothing like a bit of positive reinforcement in this department.

Other than that? Music is fucking great. We just survived Partyfest 2011 this past weekend and blew the roof off the place. Crowd surfing in the living room never felt so good. We’ve got the track listing for the album nailed down and pretty soon I’m renting a pair of monitors to get the mix hunky-dory.

Also been tidying up the website and all the social network bullshit that comes along with the internet. Seriously, what a waste of time. I’m pulling the plug on MySpace too, tired of the shit design and supporting Rupert Murdoch. Pulling out of Last.FM as well, just found out it’s lined by CBS and I really don’t want to let too many broadcasters have the rights to my music.

I don’t care if my music is ripped stolen and puked around the internet for free, that’s half the reason I’m putting it out there. I do, however, have issue when multinationals like NewsCorp act as an unofficial wing of the republican party as well as run content aggregators like MySpace.

I’m afraid to get lost in the city. I’m already homesick for the Island thinking about it. Here I’m home, I feel the land. The beaches breathe for me, I can escape. I love you mom and dad, I’ll be home soon. The city is dirty, torn, old, broken, battered, horrible. Glitz pandering to the ultramodern hypocrites, ironics looking for a good time. Grit casually observed never lived, a voyeurs look into squalor the bastard love child of Truffaut and Bukowski. Vapid suspension of disbelief is required to live in the city. Consumerist drenched insustainability, step over the homeless, drink on the skytrain, avoid fare, the metro squad, responsibility.The streets won’t invite you, the contrite you, they will ignore you. The anomie becomes you, no name, just you. I told you, the old you, lost as always, hoping for insight, cast, in a street light.

Glitch started out as a pre-Obama protest song and almost seamed a bit muted after he came into office. I realize we have bombs dropping like crazy but when the Cons are out of the house I can rest a bit easier. Needless to say the revolutions and protests happening across the middle east has inspired me to work on the song and get it out.

Mubarak eventually stepped down (after a lot of initial doubt and worry) and Egypt so far is enjoying a peaceful transition of power. Gadhafi (going with the ceeb’s spelling on this one) is a fucking lunatic. The degree of the situation never really hit me until the reports came in of the fighter pilots crashing their jets in defiance of Gadhafi – that alone is a powerful image of the severity and the need for revolution.

Hopefully it will be over soon. In Benghazi a pirate radio station is offering the ‘first free broadcast in 42 years’. Gadhafi claims the streets and squares of Tripoli are free of protestors but I suppose that happens when you shoot dissidents.

Check the song out below.

Still have some mixing issues (mainly with the compression) but overall I’m pretty happy with the track. SoundCloud apparently adds dynamic compression to all uploaded tracks and this is fucking things up especially at the start. I went back to the original mix and what a difference it makes. SoundCloud used to have higher fidelity but that seams to be sliding, probably a perk for paid users.

In the final weeks of mixing I’ll be renting a 2.1 monitor system to tweak everything before mastering but for now my Shure 840′s are doing a pretty good job of things. Big challenge in the next few weeks is going to be finishing the last few tracks. As mentioned I’ve been busy writing and Walker and I are doing some mad recording this week.

OH YEAH

Kick ass that Trent Reznor won the Oscar for Best Original Score with the SOcial Network soundtrack. ANyone listening to this track (or any of m other tracks) should know the impact NIN has had on my music. Best show of my life was seeing them live at the arena here in VIc.

Also last week I got mad at the first two tracks on the album. They have some good elements to them but as a whole they don’t fly. I was at my sisters place for the night and after watching prime time news via comedy central (I have no cable at home and it’s funner to watch them on TV than online) I started working on a new track. Going to the darkside I made an attempt at some good ol’ half temp warble bass. Dubstep.

So anyone who know me knows I like to bitch about music like nobody knows me. Dubstep is usually pretty big on my radar but as usual I just miss the hashtag of the week by a few years but it seams everyone caught onto Dubstep pretty late. Anyways, after making warble bass sounds all class and making fun of my friends (I’m a nice fellow once you get to know me) I sat down with a couple of boo’s (see cheap ass beer) and got crackin.

Started the song off I do every way which is with an octaving oompa oompa Blue Monday bassline. Record cutoff automation (any jackass can run it through a sequenced sine wave but this gives it a bit more life) and add some grime. Using the touch pad as a virtual rotary does wonders for fast sweeps.

I probably should have run it out to my bass amp and then recorded it with my Apex doorstop so I could get legit (read between the lines) but this will do, pig. Anyways check it out below, friends like it, best comment so far was that it’s swedish pop meets dubstep.

Cold (Sample) by Joey Chaos

Other than that I gotta get the ball rolling with David and get some art happening for the album. We’ve been snowballing some ideas back and forth but I gotta crack the whip and get going on it. I also have some film ideas in the works and am pretty stoked on what’s coming out before the album.

Downfall, one of the new tracks we’re working on has been a royal pain in the ass since its inception. Live it’s great, we have no problems there, but when it comes to recording it has been nothing but headaches. Every time we get close with it something comes along and fucks up the whole process.

I’ve flung myself into irony and been busy warbling bass and that seams to be helping a bit – I’m not jumping into flavour of the week (nor should I be concerned about that) but it seamed to help. My friend Brian came by the other night and helped me with the song. We cut a few vocal parts and chased away some brown sound and it’s now not hated. I do this a lot with a track – love it for a week and then get over it.

We have another track that is getting close to the done stage and it’s coming together really well. Monophonic bass and glitch dives with some good ol’ twang at the end. I’ll be posting something demo-ish next week. For now here’s a video showcasing the creative process. We’re making good progress on the new album.